ESTUARIES/TRIBUTARIES/GULFS

(a triptych)

Part Two:

The summer when he was ten, Ralph and his friends would shag balls from the river between the public golf course and the country club. They dredged the river slowly, jeans rolled just above the knees, lifting their feet straight up and setting them down lightly. Any sudden movement swirled the mud and sludge and left the river unnavigable, solid. The entire river turned cloudy. It wouldn't settle for hours.

They would carry the balls in their shirts that they fastened into satchels and hung over their shoulders. When they found all they could, they would climb the steep banks onto the golf courses to sell the balls back to the golfers. The balls didn't sell as high on the public course. The golfers always wanted to make a deal. Six for the price of five. At the country club, balls would go for a buck a piece. A near mint condition Titlest or Ping could fetch two bucks if they landed the right guy. Some guys would even pull twenties out of their pockets, buy what they had and let them keep the change. However, since the club was private porperty, they always ran the risk of being run off the course without making a single sell. Either way, the only way home was back up the river against the current.

Later that summer, near the Fourth of July, the river flooded. Every day after, they would walk down to the river to see if it had receded and to watch it push over the banks, submerging everything in its path. A week later, when the water had gone done just enough that a person could get to the bridge, they found two boys sitting on the railing of the foot bridge wearing just their shorts. They were daring each other to jump in to the swirling, raving water that was rushing by with tremendous speed. One boy lost his grip pretending to push his friend, and fell. The water swallowed him whole. His arms poked through the surface once then slid back into the murk. He never came back up. He was found two miles up river, snagged on a fallen tree.

They played baseball for the rest of the summer. They used a tennis ball, a wooden bat that had been split in half length wise, and tee-shirts for bases. They played in the school lot up behind the houses on the corner of the block. The houses both had chain-link fences. The place where the yards and fences met was the middle of center field. They set home plate in close and swung for the fences each at bat.

No score was kept. They just kept track of outs to know when to let the other guys hit. Each boy would look out into the outfield, over the heads of the other players, to the fence line.

Everyone swung big one handed home run swings like his new heroes, Dave Kingman, Mike Schmidt, Dave Parker and Reggie Jackson. They were constantly hopping the fences to retrieve the ball.

It didn't matter who hit one. Every time the ball sailed up into the air, sailed over their heads and sailed as far away from home as they could hit it, each of them raised their fists into the air and yelled.